What to do with a dismembered horse?

One staple source of stories for local newspapers is the RSPCA press office. The tales of cruelty we hear are routinely stomach-churning, but sometimes we get images that are genuinely shocking – even to hardened news hacks.

A recent example of this involved photographs we received of a horse found dismembered in a river. The key image was gruesome; the animal’s severed head and blood spattered hooves were scattered on rocks, but there was no body on show. It was truly horrific.

On this occasion our editor was away from the office, but no discussion was required to establish what everyone knew instinctively – there was no way we would publish such an image in a family newspaper.

I could imagine eyes on me – as digital editor – wondering whether I would try to pull a fast one and sneak these images onto our website. They certainly would have generated plenty of page impressions.

I would never do that. Putting aside questions of taste, I operate under the guidelines which inform the brand values of our core product – the newspaper. Sunderland Echo as a multi-channelled brand should deliver the news via different media but to the same standards across the board.

Of course there are new ethical dilemmas in the digital age – still photos of a brutal mugging seem relatively tame compared to moving images of the same incident, for instance. When we have footage like this we always consider whether showing the shots will do more good by aiding the apprehension of suspects than harm by offending the sensibilities of some website users who have the right not to click ‘play’. Footage is labelled clealy, and never gratuitous.

A footnote to this post regarding oft-claimed declining moral standards in journalism…

April’s anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster caused me to look back at the coverage from 20 years ago and proved that we weren’t so squeamish when it came to images of people crushed to within an inch of their lives in 1989. A front page picture showed young people fighting for breath, and who knows which of them survived.

Such an image would never appear in the Echo, or on echo.com these days. Standards of decency have simply improved since then.